Nature conservation on Union level has long been argued about: EC habitat conservation laws necessarily restrict the extent to which member States can determine how parts of their territory are used -eg. for development- which is a central aspect of state sovereignty. (Bell & McGillivray) Against this background, it comes as a surprise that the regime, …

Free Movement of Goods Dassonville: Articles 34, 35 TFEU prohibit not only explicit quantitative restrictions on imports and exports but also measures having equivalent effect, i.e. all measures which are ‚capable of hindering, directly or indirectly, actually or potentially, intra-Community trade‘. Danish Bees: The explicit exception made in Article 36 for, inter alia, the health …

The objects of the 1992 Biodiversity Convention are conservation, sustainable use and equitable sharing of biodiversity resources. To accomplish the first two objectives, the Convention establishes the precautionary principle as guiding tool for policy-makers in dealing with biodiversity and provides for the conduct of environmental impact assessments. The equitable sharing is supposed to be achieved …

In one of our last articles, we discussed general principles of international law. We will now narrow down and focus our attention on principles of international environmental law. These principles are no legally binding principles referred to in Article 38(1) ICJ Statute but do nevertheless have some legal significance. Although there is of course no fixed …

After the Afro-American Human Rights movement had achieved the abolishment of social segregation in the late 1960s, its eyes turned to another aspect of inequality — environmental segregation. In a number of surveys, they found that industrial or offending installations (such as waste tips) were disproportionally often located in areas that were mostly populated by …

Article 5(3) TEU sets out the principle of subsidiarity, according to which in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence (see Article 3(1) TFEU), the Union shall act only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States (…) but can rather (…) be …

It is not easy to find a short summary of the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Case which had to be decided by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1997. It is just a long story to tell. The long story, however, in short words: In 1977, Hungary and Czechoslovakia agreed on building a system of dams in …